Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [71]
The babies are really funny. They have so much energy. Everybody says they see me in them. They’re real talkative, always have an answer. They’re identical twins, but you can tell ’em apart if you’re real careful. Peggy stands real straight, and Patsy tends to slouch a little. Usually I can tell, but if I make a mistake they’re horrified. Doolittle can always tell them apart because he’s around so much. It hurts me if I get it wrong. If I’m not sure, I’ll say, “Hey, Twin, get over here.” But that doesn’t fool them. They’ll pout on me. It’s the same with strangers. One fellow tried to make conversation with ’em by saying, “When do you think I’ll be able to tell you apart?” And one of ’em looked at him like he was really stupid and said in her Southern drawl, “Prob-ly never.”
I went back to work and things kept getting better for us. Doo opened his rodeo and ran it on the ranch. When I was around, I’d be an attraction in the rodeo.
I never had ridden a horse until we got out to Washington, though I rode a mule in Kentucky. When Doo started the rodeo, I wasn’t too crazy about the whole deal. One time Doo made me get up on the back of a horse and hold on to the saddle. But the horse reared, knocked me off, and tramped on me. I had to lay around in bed for a few days while the rodeo was going on at our farm. When the fans heard I was in bed, they trooped right into my room and started taking pictures. I was surprised some of ’em didn’t ask me to show where I got hurt.
After we were on that ranch for a year or two, Doo wanted a working ranch as a good investment for our money. We talked about maybe moving back to Washington. We were never really part of Nashville’s social scene like Minnie Pearl, the late Tex Ritter, and Roy Acuff, with big homes close to town and memberships in clubs and stuff. We were still just country people, and forty-five acres wasn’t enough land for us.
One day we were riding down in Humphreys County, about sixty-five miles southwest of Nashville. We were looking at another place but we got lost on this little back road. All of a sudden, I saw this huge old house built on a hill overlooking a tiny town. It had these huge white columns in front, and to me it looked like the house “Tara” in the movie Gone with the Wind. I never pictured myself as Scarlett O’Hara, not hardly, but I could picture myself in that house. We were just parked down on the road, a hundred yards below this home, but I got all excited jumping up and down on the front seat and telling Doo, “That’s what I want! That’s what I want!”
Doo said, “Well, hell’s fire, Loretta, let’s see if it’s for sale before we go buying it.”
Doo found out nobody had been living in it for the past twenty years. It belonged to the Anderson family, who owned the red mill across the creek, but the house was falling apart since the Andersons had moved away. They actually owned the whole town—Hurricane Mills—a company town, where the workers got paid in scrip, just like the old coal towns. Anyway, the new owners were looking to sell it—the whole package of 1,450 acres, some cattle and equipment, and the house—for $220,000. That was a lot more expensive than we’d figured on. We’d just signed a lifetime contract with Decca, and we tried to use that to get us a loan. Doo put down $10,000 of earnest money, and just four days before the deal was up, one bank accepted our contract and gave us the loan.
I was so excited. I took a tour of the place. It had three floors with winding staircases, front and back, and all kinds of extra buildings around it. There were high ceilings and a huge kitchen area and, of course, the old red mill, the post office, and the general store with a filling station across the creek belonged to us. I started making plans to decorate the house, and I went back on the road again, not knowing anything about the condition of the house. That I left